Chapter Thirteen #2
Elizabeth liked them at once. She had expected to; Darcy spoke of his aunt and uncle with a respect that bordered on tenderness, Colonel Fitzwilliam was one of the most agreeable men she had ever met, and such a man had to come from somewhere.
She had little chance to become acquainted with them before the wedding, but she found that she was looking forward to getting to know both of them better.
After weeks of secrets, their directness felt like fresh air after a closed room.
The household rearranged itself around the Matlocks with the easy smoothness of a house that had been entertaining senior family for generations.
The rhythms of Elizabeth’s days, which she had only just begun to feel were her own, shifted to accommodate the visit: morning calls with local gentry, afternoon tea in company, the yellow drawing room full every evening, conversation expected and silence conspicuous.
It was the silence that worried her. Or rather, the lack of it.
For the past several weeks, Elizabeth had been able to slip away to her private parlour, to walk the grounds with Kitty, to have the conversations that mattered in the gaps between the ones that were merely expected.
With the Matlocks in residence, those gaps closed.
Lady Matlock expected Elizabeth’s company and was perceptive enough to notice if it were withheld.
Lord Matlock was observant in his quiet way, registering absences and irregularities even when he did not remark on them.
The house was fuller, louder, more watched, and Elizabeth’s double life was being pressed into a space that grew smaller by the day.
Nana was not helping.
“Margaret has rearranged the flowers in the blue sitting room,” she reported to Elizabeth on the second morning, appearing in the dressing room while Elizabeth was pinning her hair.
“She does this every time she visits. She believes the flowers should complement the wallpaper, which is nonsense; the flowers should complement the season. I’ve been fighting this battle for thirty years and I haven’t yet won it, but I am patient. ”
“You are the least patient person I have ever known, living or dead.”
“Patience and persistence are not the same thing, Mrs Darcy. I am abundantly supplied with the latter.” Nana leaned on the edge of the dressing table.
“Margaret has also been asking Mrs Reynolds about the household accounts. She does this too. She considers it her right, as the senior female relative, to ensure the house is being properly managed. Since Annie died she has appointed herself inspector-general of Pemberley’s domestic arrangements.
It is insufferable and it is also, I must admit, occasionally useful.
She spotted a discrepancy in the wine accounts three years ago that would have gone unnoticed. An under-butler had to be dismissed.”
“Do you like her?” Elizabeth asked.
Nana considered this. “I like her better than I liked her when she was twenty, which is not saying a great deal, as she was thoroughly silly at twenty. She has improved with age, which is more than can be said for most people. She is loyal, she is shrewd when she chooses to be, and she loves this family with a fierceness that I respect, even when it manifests as rearranging my flowers. She is also,” Nana added, with the air of someone delivering a final verdict, “the only woman of her generation who has never once complained about the temperature in the east corridor, which tells me she has more fortitude than she lets on.”
Or less sensitivity, Elizabeth thought, but did not say.
Lady Matlock, meanwhile, occupied Pemberley as though it was one of her own homes.
She claimed the end of the sofa nearest the fire in the yellow drawing room, commandeered Georgiana for a full accounting of her musical progress, interrogated Kitty about her preparations for the upcoming season in London with a directness that would have been rude from anyone less charming and was instead oddly flattering, and surveyed the household.
Kitty acquitted herself beautifully. Elizabeth watched her sister navigate Lady Matlock’s rapid-fire questions with a composure that would have been impossible a year ago, when Kitty would have been tongue-tied or giggling or both.
She spoke about Longbourn with affection but without apology, about her music lessons with Georgiana with genuine enthusiasm, and about her sisters with a frankness that made Lady Matlock laugh and say, “Five girls! Your poor mother. I had three boys and nearly lost my mind.”
“My mother’s mind is entirely intact,” Kitty said, “though she has put it to some unusual uses.”
Lady Matlock laughed again, and Darcy, sitting nearby with his uncle, allowed himself a small smile that was mostly directed at Elizabeth, as if to say: your sister is a credit to you, and I am glad she is here.
Lord Matlock, meanwhile, was quieter but no less observant.
He sat with Darcy after dinner, port in hand.
The two of them talked about the estate, about politics, about the progress of the war, the price of wool, the particular challenges of managing tenants through a wet autumn.
Elizabeth, watching from across the yellow drawing room, saw something in Darcy she had not seen before: an ease, a loosening.
With his uncle, the careful reserve that governed his public manner softened into something closer to the boy he must once have been, the nephew who had looked up to this man and learnt from him and trusted him.
Darcy laughed at something Lord Matlock said, a real laugh, unguarded, and Elizabeth felt a pang that was not jealousy but something adjacent to it: the recognition that there were parts of her husband she had not yet reached, parts that belonged to older relationships, deeper history.
She would have to earn her way into them rather than expect them as a right.
Lord Matlock asked questions that sounded casual and were not, listened to the answers carefully, and offered his own views measuredly; he was accustomed to being heard. He never raised his voice. He did not need to.
Elizabeth, watching from across the yellow drawing room where she was pretending to listen to Lady Matlock’s account of a disastrous dinner party in London, found herself studying Lord Matlock with fresh attention.
He was a man of influence, with connections in the government, in the law, in quiet circles where things could be done without fanfare and without scandal.
If he believed something needed to be investigated, he could set that investigation in motion through channels that would never touch a public courtroom.
The thought formed slowly, taking shape the way a figure emerges from fog: not all at once but piece by piece, until the outline was clear.
If she could find evidence, real evidence, the kind that did not depend on the testimony of the dead, Lord Matlock was the man who could act on it.
Not with the blunt force of a magistrate and a trial, but with the careful, private authority of a family protecting its own.
Wickham could be dealt with discreetly. The scandal could be contained. Lydia could be shielded.
If. The word sat in the centre of everything, small and immovable.
George Darcy was waiting for her in her parlour when she went up after the household had retired.
He was standing at the window again, looking out over the darkened grounds, and his posture was so like Darcy’s evening stillness that Elizabeth had to remind herself, again, that this was not her husband.
“I heard Margaret,” he said, without turning. “She sounds exactly the same. Exactly.”
“You are fond of her.”
He turned then, and his expression was complicated, layers of feeling shifting beneath the surface the way they always did with him, never quite settling into anything as simple as one emotion.
“She was Anne’s closest friend. They were debutantes in London together, before Anne married me, then Margaret married Anne’s brother.
” He paused. “Margaret held my children together when I died. She came within the week, stayed for a month, did everything I should have arranged for but did not, because I was too proud and too foolish to admit I would not live forever.”
“She offered to take Georgiana after Anne died, she said today.”
“More than once. I refused because I could not bear to lose my daughter as well as my wife, even to someone who would have cared for her well.” His mouth tightened.
“I was not a good father, I fear. I was grieving, blind. I let Wickham into my home while pushing my own son away. Margaret saw it, said nothing, because she was too kind to tell a mourning man that he was making a mess of everything.”
“She was not too kind,” Elizabeth said. “She was too tactful. There is a difference.”
George Darcy looked at her, and the ghost of a smile crossed his face. “You sound like her when you say things like that.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was intended as one.”
They were quiet for a moment. Then George said, “Her husband. Matlock. He was here often in those last years too. He and I were not close, not in the way Margaret and Anne were close, but I respected him. He is a man who sees things clearly and acts on what he sees. If there had been anything to notice about my death, he would have noticed it.”
“But there was nothing to notice.”
“No. That is the genius of what Wickham did, is it not? There was nothing to see. A sudden death, a grieving household, a physician’s verdict, and the world moved on. The only witnesses were the dead, and the dead cannot speak to anyone except you.”
The candle on the mantelpiece flickered. The room was cold, but not with the sharp, aggressive cold that signalled George Darcy’s anger. This was quieter, sadder.
“Matlock could help,” Elizabeth said. “If I had evidence. He has the connections, the authority, the discretion.”
“He does. He is also Fitzwilliam’s uncle and Georgiana’s guardian in all but name, and if he believed for one moment that their father had been murdered, he would not rest until the man responsible was destroyed. He would do it quietly, because that is his way, but he would do it thoroughly.”
“That is what I need.”
“Then find him something to act on, Mrs Darcy. Because I can tell you what happened, and Nana can tell you what she saw, but neither of us can lay evidence before Matlock. Only you can do that.”
From somewhere down the corridor came the sound of a door closing, footsteps, Lady Matlock’s voice saying something to her maid that Elizabeth could not quite catch.
George Darcy looked toward the sound, and his face was naked with longing.
She was going about the ordinary business of living in a house where he could no longer do the same.
“She visits Anne’s grave every time she comes to Pemberley,” he said. “In the family graveyard. She goes alone, first thing in the morning, before anyone else is awake. She has done it every visit for sixteen years.”
Elizabeth said nothing. Some things did not require a response.
“I cannot visit it,” George Darcy said. “I am bound to the house. The graveyard is beyond my reach. I have not been to my wife’s grave since the day I was buried beside her, and I do not remember that, because I was already dead.”
He turned back to the window, and the candle guttered, and the cold in the room deepened.
“Find the evidence, Elizabeth. Give Matlock something real. And when this is over, when Wickham has been dealt with and I can finally rest, perhaps Margaret will come to the grave one last time, and I will be there to meet her.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Lady Matlock will want to walk the grounds, and I intend to walk with her. I intend to listen carefully to everything she says.”
George Darcy nodded once. Then he was gone, not fading the way the gentler ghosts did, but simply absent, as though the force that held him had released its grip for the night.
The parlour was warm again. The candle burned steady. Elizabeth went to bed, where her husband was already sleeping. She lay beside him in the dark, trying not to think about evidence, or the lack of it, or the visit to the churchyard that Lady Matlock would make in the morning.